Harris: Why Apple Isn't The Top Tech Brand

Why isn't Apple a top tech brand? Essentially, the company's products are too expensive, the executive vice president responsible for Harris Interactive's brand consulting division said late Wednesday.

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Why isn't Apple a top tech brand? Essentially, the company's products are too expensive, the executive vice president responsible for Harris Interactive's brand consulting division said late Wednesday.

Apple, of course, enjoys a stellar reputation as a manufacturer of hardware products. But Jeni Chapman, executive vice president of brand and communications consulting for Harris, said in an email interview that Apple's premium prices put the company's brand at a lower position relative to its competitors.

Others have suggested that while Apple's reputation as a manufacturer of products remains virtually unparalleled, Apple's actions in the industry - with regards to its approval and rejection of apps within its apps store, for example - may have nicked the Apple brand a bit.

Harris polled over 25,000 U.S. consumers to assemble the results, which measures the connection the brands have with consumers, commitment, the brand's behavior, advocacy, trust, and brand equity. The latter, the most important metric, is considered the brand's overall strength and is measured by familiarity, quality, and how it factors into a purchase, or "purchase intent".

In other words, the poll went beyond just asking the question, "What's the best mobile-phone brand?"

Specifically, a Harris representative said, respondents were asked 14 questions per brand. She said that the exact questions were confidential, but consumers were asked about the familiarity a user had with each brand; if the user was familiar with it, the consumer was then asked about its quality, and how likely a consumer would be to purchase its products. Harris then applied statistical analysis to come up with its scores.

So why isn't Apple on top?

Apple was included in both the list of computer manufacturers and phone manufacturers, but not as a generic consumer-electronics company. That reflects Harris' decision on which categories to include them in. (LG and Samsung, the top seller of mobile phones in the U.S., were left out of the mobile-phone branding list because Harris perceived both as generic CE vendors, rather than companies whose brands identified them with mobile phones.)

Apple ranked second in the category of computer manufacturers, behind Hewlett-Packard; in mobile phones, the Harris poll put it a distant fifth.

"For this year as in previous years, we have put Apple into the list of brands for computers; admittedly this reflects their legacy business as opposed to their current product focus," Chapman said. "We will be looking to re-organize these categories in future waves; with the rise of smart phones and multi-functional devices, there is a definite blurring on how to define some of these categories."

For computers, Hewlett-Packard ranked higher, due to "due to higher levels of familiarity with the brand and purchase intent," Chapman said. "Essentially, Apple lags in purchase content compared to HP."

And that's essentially why Apple fell behind some of the other brands in the survey, Chapman said.

"Overall, the question, which is a good one, is why is Apple not higher? This is a brand with a market cap that now exceeds that of Microsoft. The answer lays with the brand's positioning and price point," Chapman said. "It is a close ended system in many ways; you need to be somewhat engaged in the Apple ecosystem for many of its devices. It is also a 'mass niche' brand if you will  and so ultimately it lags on purchase intent compared to other big brands in the study and in the categories where it competes."

Apple's price premiums hurt the company, Chapman said, interpreting the consumer data supplied by the survey. (Click "Next" below for the second half of the story: Is Apple's Brand Heading Downhill?)

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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